It's exactly the shift we are working on. Come end of the year, the changes we initiated earlier this year will come to fruition. I'll be in touch :)

Steve,

I am well aware of these reviews, as well as of the performance issues that our service is, still, experiencing. A significant portion of our customer base is not being serviced as it should be. It is an embarrassment to me and I am doing and investing all that I can to address and fix the situation.

We have made significant progress over the last several months in addressing these issues, but we're far from done. Sadly, it is not easy to catch up on an aspect of our business that was, and I am open to admit fault, improperly managed for many years. What makes matters worse is that, having legacy software in place across our network, we can't properly resolve all issues until that source of problems is alleviated.

With the release of Imperia in fall this year, we will be migrating our entire customer base to an entirely new hardware infrastructure and at the same time migrate away from our legacy H-Sphere based software. We have designed the new system from the ground up to alleviate all current issues. In fact, effective next week, we have some of our new infrastructure in place already and will utilize it to host H-Sphere based accounts. This should provide an immediate improvement before the migration to Imperia will begin.

I apologize for the delay in getting the comments to show on this post! This has been fixed and previously submitted comments should now be appearing, or at the very least, you should have heard from me or one of our staff.

To address the issues that came up in the vivid discussion around my first post:

1) I acknowledge that there still are quite significant issues with database performance. We are working on them, however, complete resolution will not happen until the final migration to Imperia. This process will start in about 3 months. That said, we are also currently deploying our 'old' hosting software (H-Sphere based) on a cloud infrastructure. This should be ready to go in about two to three weeks, and we will start mass migrations of accounts to the new, much faster infrastructure, to help alleviate the load on older database servers. This will make DB performance faster for both accounts that are migrated, as well as those that are not. In addition to that, depending on the urgency of your issue, I will be happy to migrate your databases to a different server and our team will assist in the process.

I wish I had better news on that front, but due to the legacy and really not thought-out nature of how H-Sphere distributes databases (or resource load in general), we are very restrained by the inherent flaws of the system. So in the meantime until Imperia is online, all I can offer is above paths to resolution.

2) Spam: Ironport is supposed to filter almost all Spam coming to our network, and as Tibi has commented on my last post, spammers have found a way around this firewall. We're currently testing to close that 'loop hole,' which I hope to have completed within the next two weeks. After that, we'll be rolling out the fix to all mailservers. This should dramatically reduce the amount of Spam. Tibi will be posting about this issue in our Status Blog (status.ixwebhosting.com) tomorrow morning, and I'd welcome anyone with a Spam issue today to comment on his post. He can then look into your account and see if our proposed solution will indeed fix your problem, or if there is something else we may be missing that we have to address as well.

3) FTPS (FTP over SSL/TCL): This will be fully supported by Imperia, as well as secure logins to Webmail and any management interface (such as PhpMyAdmin, etc). We are currently evaluating to implement FTPS on our existing infrastructure (so that it is available to you before the Imperia upgrade), but I don't have an ETA on this yet. Tibi will update our status blog with more information in that regard. Here are the two relevant status blog posts that elaborate further on the FTP issue, and also propose a temporary solution:
http://status.ixwebhosting.com/2009/06/30/extra-f...
http://status.ixwebhosting.com/2009/07/15/ftp-sec...

We're still evaluating how to quickly implement and securing any other management interface logins (ie. Webmail, phpMyAdmin, etc). This is definitely on the agenda.

4) All auto-install scripts should now be updated across our network. Please let us know if you find that any newly installed script is not and we'll look into it right away.

5) Shell Access will be available with Imperia. If you need it earlier, we launched our VPS offering last week:
http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.vp...

6) Imperia will feature an all-new Website Creator (SiteStudio will still be available for existing customers, but you may switch to create a new site in the new Website Creator any time), as well as an improved File Manager, and improved functionality for backing up and restoring our website and email. The first release of Imperia may not be as powerful as we'd like it to be in that regard, but a release soon after that will feature highly advanced functionality for both backup and restore.

We hear from IntenseDebate's staff that they're working on it. We'll update the blog software as soon as possible.

It's online now:
http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.vp...

And, VPS has been released:
http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.vp...

Xuming - we have launched our VPS offering. Check out this link for details:
http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.vp...

Yes, all in-house.

I'll make an announcement on the blog about this towards the end of the month, when we actually start to have something to show you for Imperia. Thanks for all your interest.

Whops, I don't believe those were supposed to show up just yet. We're very close to release. I'm counting on next week, fingers crossed.